Often times as a small business, there are so many things on the plate to do, it can be easy to miss some of the most basic, yet also most effective practices that make sure your business is running efficiently.
Regularly reviewing your customer profiles (also known as customer avatars) is one of them.
What is a customer avatar? According to Einstein Marketer, a customer avatar is a detailed profile of your ideal customer. It doesn’t make assumptions or categorize people into groups. The avatar focuses on one person and outlines everything about them.
The benefit of a customer avatar is that you always have a clear picture of who you are trying to reach and serve with your offers. Especially with brick and mortar businesses, you might have 3 different types of customers your offers appeal to. It is very possible to attract and serve them all and the key to doing this with the least amount of stress is creating detailed customer avatars.
Creating customer avatars assumes of course, that you’ve already done detailed marketing research for your business. (If you haven’t, no worries – we can help you with that! Just message us for a consultation). Once you’ve done that though, having it clearly in front of you to refer to is golden.
These are the types of questions you want to ask when creating a customer avatar.
Customer Avatar Building Questions
- What gender and age is this person? What do they do for a living and how much are they making on average a year?
- When it comes to what your business does, what goals does this person have? What do they value in general in this area? Where would they like to be in 1 year and in 5 years and how could what you offer assist them in that?
- Now think about what their challenges are and what annoys them in regards to your industry (or even their life in general). Where have they been failed at in the industry and how does your product/service come in to save the day for them?
- You also want to think about where they *are*. What magazines are they reading? (Yes, magazines are still relevant!). What books do they make time to read? What websites are they subscribe for updates to? What Facebook groups and pages do they follow (especially the ones that they’ve specified to show up first in their feed).
- What things stand in the way of them making a purchase? What are they unsure about? What keeps them from buying. In general, what do they fear most when it comes to your industry and what you offer?
- Another great exercise is to describe a day in the life of this customer. This will help you get a tangible picture of them and see where else you can fit in marketing messages.
We’ve created a fun Customer Avatar Worksheet that puts all of these questions on one sheet. You’ll have an easy reference for when you begin creating your marketing material!
You can download that here or click download below!
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